


Empty Ropes

by irritableDemiurge



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Ancestors, Dream Bubbles, F/F, Gen, Ghosts, Hanging mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-20
Updated: 2014-06-26
Packaged: 2018-01-25 19:49:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1660397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irritableDemiurge/pseuds/irritableDemiurge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vriska is thinking about Pyropes, and as usual, the dream bubbles give her exactly what she doesn't want in the worst way possible. Two people who never thought would meet have a conversation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. White Trees

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set somewhere between Vriska losing her fleet and her conversation with Meenah in the last upd8s. Don't you just love it when horrible people become slightly less horrible people so you can feel better about liking them so much?
> 
> Previously titled White Trees and Empty Ropes, but there will be more chapters and it wouldn't fit for all of them.

Dream bubbles were fickle things. They were shaped as much by your own memories and dreams as they were by every other inhabitant’s. If you thought about a place or a person you were likely to run into them, but more often than not they looked different than you remembered, or were from a different timeline than you.

Which was just as well in your opinion, because you found yourself in the forest of white trees with pink leaves far too often. There were no hanging scalemates here though, no treehive and no doomsday scale. _Maybe this is the other Pyrope's memory_ , you thought. What was her name? Latula or something. You'd never really spoken to her. When she first saw you she greeted you with excitement, calling you _l1l s3rkz_ , but she's avoided you ever since. Come to think of it, she wasn't as talkative around Aranea as she was around everyone else either. Asking about their history would probably be interesting, but you didn't really care. You had enough problems with one Pyrope in your life, and you hadn't seen neither nose nor hair of any instance of Terezi since she killed you.

The sound of footsteps behind you snapped you out of your thoughts. You saw the flash of two perfectly conical horns and red shades in the distance. At first you thought it must be Latula and were about to go in some other direction to avoid her, but her clothes were different. Bright cherry red overwhelmed teal, and her hair was shorter. The woman was too tall to be Terezi either though, and while she carried a cane similar to your sister’s, she was using it as a walking stick, and not to test the ground in front of her.

Curiosity overwhelmed you and you stopped in your tracks. She caught up surprisingly quickly, and acknowledged you with a nod of her head. Her horns towered above you, making her already impressive stature even more imposing. And even though they were covered, you could tell her eyes were the same milky white as yours.

Redglare continued down the path and you followed a step behind her. The silence between you was interrupted only by the sound of feet crushing leaves, but it wasn’t too uncomfortable. After a while, she spoke.

“You remind me of her. Not just the way you look, but the way you hold yourself, the way you move. It’s very unsettling.”

Her voice was not as high-pitched as you expected it to be. It sounded more like Latula than Terezi, which you supposed made sense. It still had that same throaty, raspy quality you were so used to though.

“You remind me of her, too,” you told her, and surprised yourself, because you really wanted to ask about your own ancestor.

But she must have detected your curiosity somehow, because she carried on talking as if you hadn’t said anything.

“The Marquise had this bearing to her that just screamed self-assurance. She was always the most confident person in the room. Even after I maimed her and clapped her in every iron in a legislacerator’s arsenal, she never looked anywhere other than my eyes when we spoke. And although she was slumped forward when she walked, like you were just now, Mindfang looked like she would be able to kill you with a single movement of her arm in less than a moment.” She looked at you. “I should have taken that as a warning. But then, it was not I who filled the courtblock with rustbloods at her trial.”

“Did it hurt,” you asked then, “when you died?”

Redglare simply nodded. “But the humiliation hurt the most.”

“Yeah,” you sighed. “I know what you mean.”

The two of you walked in silence for a little longer. This time, you were the first to break it.

“I never thought she’d actually go through with it!”  
“She’s my descendant. Of course she went through with it.”  
“Yeah, but still…We were sisters!”

You said that louder than you meant to, your mixed feelings about your death coloring your words with frustration and confusion.

“The relationship you two had was much longer and much more complicated than the one the Marquise and I had, but I can’t help but feel partly responsible. As if our fates were bound in a karmic cycle of revenge, orchestrated by paradox space itself.”

The sound of leaves was replaced by the sound of Redglare’s cane hitting solid marble. You were walking among rows and rows of empty benches, towards a raised pedestal. You knew what was on top of it before you looked up – the gallows destined for your ancestor were shaped like the symbol on Redglare’s chest. The rope, already tied into a noose, was swinging from side to side in the forest breeze. You imagined it wrapping itself around your neck, squeezing your throatstem, your neck snapping like the driest twig in Terezi's forest. You shivered.

“If it makes you feel any better,” said the legislacerator, gesturing at the empty pews, “your death was orchestrated by the descendant of the one who orchestrated mine. The unseen hand of the Messiahs stretches further than I could ever have imagined in life.”

“She’s still the one who killed me,” you protested. “She’s a cheater! A no good filthy backstabber!”

“If I were her,” the older woman interrupted your angry tirade, “I’d have done the same thing.” She sat down on the steps and patted an empty spot next to herself. You sank down with a sigh, and watched her hook the head of her cane on her knee. She gave it a light push, and it started swinging in time with the noose.

“Yeah. Me too,” you admitted.  
The silence lasted even longer this time. You counted the seconds by each swing of her cane, but once you reached eight for the eighth time you lost track.

“Have you seen her since it happened?”  
“No. Not yet.”  
“What would you say to her if you did?”  
“I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t say anything.”  
“Not even call her a no good filthy backstabber?”  
“Well okay, I’d probably do that. But only if she talked to me first.”  
“Mindfang was like that too. Always wanted the first _and_ the last word, but only when she could assert herself somehow. Interrupting and cutting in all the time. I don’t think I ever managed to say a full sentence to her in the few days we knew each other, while she could never shut up.”  
She turned towards you, white oculars staring directly into yours from behind tinted lenses.  
“If you see her – when you see her – don’t hesitate. She probably feels a lot worse about what happened than you do.”  
“Why would she feel worse?” you asked. “ _She_ killed _me_. I’m the one who has to be dead and irrelevant because her stupid powers made her stick me with a sword like I was some sort of common criminal!”

“You were her sister.”

Redglare grabbed her cane, which had just stopped swinging, and stood up. “Nice talking to you,” she said as farewell, and headed back in the direction you came from. You watched her go, still sitting in the middle of the steps. Your sight got blurry after a while, and by the time you lifted up your glasses and wiped your eyes, the Neophyte was gone.

It was a while longer before you left. The elder Pyrope had given you a lot to think about. But with one last look at the libra-shaped gallows, you decided that when you do next see Terezi, you won’t run away.

Even in death you were still avoiding responsibility. But maybe you could do it once, for her. For the first time in your life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Are there ancestor ghosts? Probably not. But I just started reading Filling Blanks and Taking Names and I wanted to write a Redglare fic for a while, so here we are. I'll probably follow this up with something.


	2. Black Sails

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Terezi gets to talk to Mindfang. She does not enjoy it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did write a follow-up! It just took over a month for some reason. This one is harder to place in the canon timeline than the first one. Damn it Terezi, can't you take a nap between getting dogzapped from planet to planet and beaten by a horrible clown? Get your priorities in order, girl.

Going to sleep after Prospit was destroyed but before the dream bubbles were created was one of the most horrifying experiences someone could have. Or so you'd heard. You were pretty glad that you never had to go through that anyway.

Less horrifying than the alternative or not, all you could really say about the bubbles was that they were _sad._

Living people could come and go, as long as they had a way to travel between them. The dead were confined there, in a prison of memories, forever. Unless they were Sollux. Mr. Appleblast got special privileges, but you didn’t really listen when Aradia tried explaining them to you. For now you were just glad you weren’t dead.

You were in someone else’s memory, that was for sure. Waves soaked the sand at your feet, each one getting closer and closer, but you didn’t bother moving. Instead you stared towards the horizon. The ocean seemed to go on forever, extending endlessly in every direction.

Somehow you missed the crunch of sand beneath feet behind you until it was already very close. Vision dulled more than just your smell. You turned around slowly, not really in the mood to talk to anyone.

An adult troll was approaching you, and you knew who it was the moment you laid eyes on her. Your protein chute dried up.

Mindfang was everything you were not. She was tall and imposing, with a handsome face complete with full lips and framed by long, wavy hair that shined like obsidian. Her coat billowed at her feet, and you were almost prepared to believe it did that all the time, wind or no wind.

All in all, while she did resemble Aranea physically, her hair and the smug smile plastered on her face reminded you of Vriska, and only Vriska.

When she spoke though, her voice went gratingly against that impression.

“Hello there, little Pyrope,” she sing-songed, and you could totally hear Aranea calling you that if she were a lot older than you. Okay, technically she _was_ a lot older than you, but she didn’t look it.

“Mind if we talk for a while?” You were surprised she asked. She shouldn’t have given you a choice – you dismissed her with a shake of your head and turned back towards the ocean. The Marquise was beside you in three long strides, and followed your gaze across the waves.

“This is my memory,” she told you, but you’d already figured that out. “Look, I just want to talk to you for like eight minutes. Your ancestor and I had our issues, and we didn’t have anyone else to help us talk them through. Really, I’m doing you a favour!”

“You’re failing at making the idea any more appealing,” you informed her flatly, and she bristled.

“You little…Look, it’ll do you no good to be stubborn! Keep ignoring me until you wake up, see if I care. But I’ll still be right here when you go to sleep again! You don’t have much of a choice so you might as well get it over with.”

You sighed deeply and turned to look at her. “Why do you Serkets all have to be so overdramatic?”

She grinned at your question and whipped her head to the side, failing to throw her mass of hair over her shoulder like Vriska used to. There was just too much of it. She scowled when she saw your bemused expression.

“Not enough blood and salt in it,” she informed you, and you nodded.

When she didn’t speak again, it was the first time you realized that she was a different person from the other two. Neither of them would ever wait for you to speak first for so long.

“So,” you gestured towards some rocks cropping out of the ground a bit further ahead, “talk.”

You made your way towards them. Mindfang’s coat whipped against your legs when she ran past you and started climbing them like an excited child. When she reached the top she raised her fists above her head, shouted “First!” and sat down on the highest point. She beckoned you over impatiently and you sped up.

Once you were on top she made some space for you and you sat down as well. From your new vantage point you noticed something you hadn’t before – vague silhouettes of numerous ships far in the distance.

Mindfang pointed at them. “Those were all mine,” she told you. “We can’t see from here, but there were eighty!” She inspected your face for any sign of admiration. You just shrugged, though it was mostly to annoy her. Mindfang’s lips pressed into a thin line.

“That’s a lot. That’s even more than the Orphaner had, and he had the biggest fleet in the entire Imperial navy! I was very impressive.”

“Until my ancestor turned you all into pirate fillet,” you said with your nastiest grin, and she huffed indignantly. “It wasn’t a fair fight, she had a dragon.”

“You still lost!”

“It blinded me in one eye! No one could expect me to win a fight against a wiggler right after losing my depth perception, but I still held my own. And I killed her _plus_ His Honorable Tyranny only a few days later! With one arm.”

This time you were the one whose lips pressed into a thin line. “I should probably hang you for that. If I was a good legislacerator.” The waves started washing up increasingly copious amounts of black blood, and you could hear the distant echo of a roaring crowd.

Mindfang shrugged. “You can try. I probably deserve it. But I’m already dead, so it wouldn’t do anyone much good.” She pointed towards her chest. “And anyway, I got lanced like a sucker a few hundred sweeps later. I knew it was gonna happen and I was still surprised, can you believe it?” She shook her head in disbelief.

“Marquise Spinneret Mindfang got suckerstabbed!” You cackled at the delicious irony of it.

“And Neophyte Redglare, trump card of the Empire, got suckerhanged! That’s way worse.” Your grin faltered, and she actually looked sorry for a second. “Look shrimp, I know you’re miserable right now. And frankly, you should be! Because you stabbed tiny me in the back or something. I didn’t really pay attention. But if it makes you feel any better, at least you’re not the first Pyrope that got played by a clown.”

It did not make you feel any better. In fact, it made you feel even worse. “Did you just call me a shrimp?” you muttered, unwilling to let the conversation continue in the direction it was going.

“Yup. After you spend enough time at sea you sort of start using expressions like that. Dualscar was _so_ terrible. Sometimes I think the only reason I was ever in a kissmessitude with him were the stupid fish puns! He was a such a shitty rival for me in retrospect. But the names he called me…” The pirate shook her head and drifted off.

“Where exactly is this conversation going?” you asked her impatiently. “What’s your point?”

“My point,” she replied, articulating each word carefully, “is that you shouldn’t blame yourself. Or her, for that matter! But-“

“But I do blame her,” you cut her off. “Vriska killed hundreds of innocents, she crippled one of my friends, killed another, and then she killed the one she crippled to top it all off. She manipulated and cheated and tormented and lied and lied and lied and she was my sister and I feel responsible! And in the end she convinced herself she was some big hero instead of a selfish jerk and decided to do something that would have gotten everyone who still cared about her killed.”

Mindfang was looking at without blinking, her mouth hanging open slightly. It wasn’t surprising; you hadn’t exactly been forthcoming with words up till then.

“And as if that wasn’t enough,” you continued, “then I realize that it was my stupidity which got me stuck with the two worst possible choices in the first place. What kind of Seer doesn’t see when she’s being so obviously stringed along?” You sighed. “A wiggler would have realized she couldn’t possibly have killed all those people like that.”

The Marquise opened her mouth to interject, but you didn’t give her the chance. Now that you were finally talking it felt too good to stop “And the worst part? I actually realized my theory made no sense. Even when she was killing every FLARPer she could get her hands on she had a reason, but Feferi? Kanaya? Drinking blood? I should have sent someone after her or talked her out of it, or done _something_ different, but instead I followed a bunch of nonsensical clues and when it came down to it decided executing my childhood friend was the reasonable course of action.”

Mindfang waited for a moment to make sure you were done before speaking. “I’m not entirely sure why you’re letting it get to you so much. But then, we’re very different people!” She wrapped a friendly arm around your shoulders and you went stiff as a board.

“When you’re stuck with two wrong choices, in a situation where you _have_ to choose one of them, you’re obviously going to be wrong. Simply by definition you are already unable to make the right choice. Which sucks! And you’ll have to live with it for the rest of your life. The regret, the guilt, whatever you want to call it. But do you know how I dealt with it?”

You looked at her sceptically. “When have you ever regretted doing something bad in your life? You sort of were a criminal.”

She pretended to be insulted. “How dare you! I’ll have you know not a day went by that I didn’t regret killing your ancestor. If we could have both lived, our rivalry would have struck red miles across-“

“Yes, Vriska made me read your journal, you don’t have to quote it at me,” you informed her. Her face lit up. “Oh, you’ve read my journal? What did you think about…” She stopped when you gave her a _look_.

“Right. Back to the point. _If_ we could have both lived. But we couldn’t have, you see? The clowns sent someone they knew I would underestimate after me, so I was caught. But they also filled the execution block with so many peasantbloods I could have overthrown a small city! Thus, they put me in a position where I could either use them to kill her, or not. In which case I would have died. Sounds familiar?”

You nodded, because it did.

“There you have it then!” she exclaimed. “I don’t blame myself because kill or be killed is not a fair choice to have to make, even when you’re not being manipulated into making it. And I don’t blame her because hunting down the dangerous villain with a sword was the right thing to do.” She leaned towards you and whispered: “Not that I actually think I was a villain. But she did, so for her it was the right thing to do. Get it? We were in the exact same situation, and I suggest you adopt the exact same attitude.”

You grimaced, because it wasn’t the exact same situation. But, you admitted to yourself reluctantly, she had a point. Hers was the right attitude. You just weren’t sure if you were capable of having it. Maybe Mindfang was right earlier, maybe you were too different from her to see these things the same way. You sighed.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Great!” The pirate jumped up to her feet and dusted off the back of her coat, even though she could have just remembered the dirt away. She gave you another serious look with her unnerving milky eyes. “That’s all I ask, or else _she_ ’ll have my ghostly hide. Oh and also,” she put her hands on your back. “When you see little me again you should go talk to her. Redglare said she’d tell her to talk to you too, but knowing me she won’t do it. Bye now!” With that, she shoved you off the rocks into the water.

You flailed your arms in front of you and squeezed your eyes shut. You woke up gasping for air, still feeling the cold water enveloping your body. God what a psycho. Turns out Serkets are all exactly the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep thinking this should probably be two separate fics in a collection tbh but yeah. Scourgecest fics where they actually get to meet are coming up I swear


End file.
